Communications devices such as cellular telephones, mobile communication devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptops, and the like are becoming more prevalent as users appreciate the smaller form factors, increased functionality, and the mobility of the devices. It is not uncommon for a household to give up its land lines and use mobile devices exclusively. To that end, femtocells have been growing in popularity. Use of a femtocell can prevent dead zones with its area of coverage. A femtocell can be thought of as a small wireless base station having a limited area of coverage. Femtocells are typically designed for residential or small business use. Commonly, a femtocell acts as a connection to an Internet and as a wireless router to various wireless devices. Calls are connected to the devices via an approved wireless interface and the call is backhauled (communicated to a communications network) via the Internet.
With this increase in availability of cellular coverage comes problems associated with the use of mobile devices in this fashion. Suites of location-based services have been developed around the premise that service providers are able to identify the location of mobile devices attached to their networks and provide additional services based on that location. More specifically is the requirement by the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) that emergency 911 (E911) calls made from mobile devices must provide caller location accuracy to be within 50 meters for 67% of the calls and within 100 meters for 100% of the calls. For devices that do not have GPS, the accuracy will typically be lower than for those devices that have embedded GPS capability. In order to meet the FCC requirements, the use of femtocells may be further exploited in order to raise the overall location accuracy, even for legacy mobile devices that may not have GPS capability embedded therein.